


all the tender places

by klickitats



Series: the sun rising [2]
Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/F, Fallow Mire, Femslash February, Pining, Plague Rituals, Undead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-07
Updated: 2016-03-07
Packaged: 2018-05-25 06:50:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6184882
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/klickitats/pseuds/klickitats
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Adaar follows Vivienne out into the Fallow Mire in the middle of the night. The murky, plague-ridden swamp makes an odd place for this kind of confession, but here they are.</p>
            </blockquote>





	all the tender places

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on my tumblr. Featuring Vivienne and former military captain Adaar.

Muggy nights in the Fallow Mire make breathing a chore. But Adaar’s grateful for the distraction. She pictures her lungs uncoiling like spools of twine, gathering air and cloud, and winding back up again. Made and unmade. Made and unmade.

The requisition camp is so small. It’s surrounded by the broken huts of a former village, burned out and wasted by a lethal combination of demons and undead.  Her brain spins in lazy, winding rotations. A pair of soldiers bicker by the fire as they play cards over countless idiocies. Anything to distract. They want to go home. They want so badly to go home.

Out of the corner of her eye, Vivienne slips out of her tent and walks off the edge of camp. No word to any of the soldiers or the night watch.

Adaar’s lifting her quiver over her shoulder, bow and knife in hand before her mind can catch up. The humidity clings to her like a clammy second skin. Vivienne moves quick, but Adaar is faster, leaving her armor behind and buttoning her jacket as she takes a shortcut through a broken-down smithy that smells of pus.  

When Adaar appears from behind a tree, Vivienne only blinks.

“Bold move for a wounded soldier,” she says idly, eyes resting on Adaar’s arm.

As if on cue, her shoulder pangs with a bone-deep ache. Adaar acknowledges none of it, and shrugs. “Do you think I’ll leave you alone out here?” she asks.  

Vivienne says nothing, as one good turn deserves another, and heads out without a word into the night.

It never occurs to her to question why Vivienne’s decided to go out alone into the plague-ridden mire with only the moon for light. Whether it’s alphabetizing her alchemy tomes, leaving sachets of tea on Solas’ workspace, or taking this staircase instead of another, Vivienne’s never without a reason for anything.

This is no exception.

They wander in the dark. Vivienne does not cast a light, or ask her to keep watch. They merely search, until Vivienne kneels next to a rotting corpse on a creek bank. She opens a blue silk bag, takes a handful of salt, wood shavings, and embrium ash to sprinkle liberally on the face and hands.

Every inch of Adaar’s skin goes clammy, a cold radiating from within. Perspiration forms at her temples. She focuses on the work of Vivienne’s fingers instead of the rot beneath them.

“You were a captain in the Orlesian army,” Vivienne says. It’s not a question.

Adaar grunts.

“I thought you’d be less—sensitive,” Vivienne continues, “about the dead.”

Adaar watches her empty another fistful of the mixture into the gaping hole in his chest cavity. “I’m not the one playing undertaker at midnight.”

A long pause. “Oh.” Vivienne never makes sounds of surprise, only discovery. She flicks her fingers and the corpse alights with blue flames, soft as morning glory, strong enough to burn even under the water.

They watch the corpse burn.

“You dislike the undead,” Vivienne says.

Adaar answers, “Everyone dislikes the undead.”

“You’re sweating.” She doesn’t even spare her a glance. “Your hands aren’t shaking. By practice, not instinct.”

“You can tell the difference?”

“The strain lies in your wrists.” As though that explains anything. Vivienne stands and brushes dirt from her front, turning to find another corpse ready to be doused with her alchemical fire.  

Adaar follows, a shadow under the moonlight. She pops open the first few buttons of her collar, as decorum can go by the wayside when one is knee-deep in a swamp. The tendons of her neck flex as she draws a long, controlled breath.

“I do not require you,” Vivienne reminds, kneeling by her next rotting corpse. A handful of ash goes to the crater in its face, over the heart, over the stomach.

She never does. Adaar knows this well. There is nothing in this world Vivienne cannot do for herself by sheer force of will, an iron thread woven in her veins from sole to crown.

But Adaar never wastes an opportunity to be of use. Not to her. Not with that lace handkerchief folded carefully inside her jacket, even here, where the worst place in Thedas might claim it for itself.

The wind blows, and the smell winds itself around Adaar’s head, twisting smoke too strong for wind. She imagines it curling around her horns, holding on tight. _Breathe_. _Made and unmade._

“We have soldiers to do this,” Adaar points out. “Mage soldiers.”

“And guards to guard me.” Vivienne flicks her fingers, and the fire erupts with the softness of a sigh. Adaar has never known someone to use magic so easily before, with such command and grace.  They say apostates understand magic like you understand your own lungs, but Vivienne works with the perfection of a weaver, a woman with the most total understanding of warp and weft. If she motions, it bends. If she sighs, it stands at attention. It longs for direction.

A woman for whom the elements wait.

Adaar realizes she is staring, and casts her eyes across the wet expanse of the blackened lake. She doesn’t realize Vivienne has moved on until the tell-tale shuffle of her boots through the muck, and she launches herself after her. She finds a grove of several bodies untended, and as she unlaces that particular blue bag again Adaar leans against a rock.

“Of all the beasts crawling the earth,” Vivienne murmurs, because she’d never actually say anything under her breath she didn’t want heard and remembered, “you fear the undead?”

Adaar huffs a dry laugh at that, her throat too parched to make much noise. She closes her eyes and focuses on swallowing.

“The Inquisitor who once proclaimed, ‘the most treasured part of meeting any new friend is learning all the tender places for my arrows.’” Vivienne tips the chin of a corpse down, fills its empty nose with dust.

“I was drinking,” says Adaar.

“A sentiment well-suited for embroidery on your banner,” she remarks, as blue flames spill from her fingers. “Is it simple for you, as it is for our friends?”

Vivienne remarking on anything as _ours_ instead of _mine_ or _yours_ never fails to spark tinder in Adaar’s chest, even if it’s just referring to the miles-long stone fortress they both happen to call home.

Adaar drops her tone in poor imitation of Blackwall. “ _What’s down should stay there._ ”

“Precisely.” She dusts off her fingers and turns to a new body, one without either arm. “I suppose you’ll have a slightly more dignified response.” Vivienne’s way of saying—that’s not your reason, but I won’t ask. It’s not polite. 

Adaar fingers the bridge of her temple. In her early days with the army, her captain’s always put her on hauling duty—disposing of the dead, building the pyres. _You’re a big ox-girl_ , they said, wide smiles, _put your back to use._ Adaar had done it, done it until a band of raiders attacked their burning pit and defended herself against six men with a flaming log and a boot-knife.

“It’s not the dead.” She hears herself speaking, but her voice is far away, lingering on another side of the marsh. “I don’t quite know what it is.” It’s a lie, but not a suspicious one.

“The smell’s a convincing argument.” Vivienne drips fire in a line down the carcass, forehead to shin, like drops of rain. “The grotesque contortions, the abominable act itself.”

“Of course.” Talking helps—focuses her attention into a thin line of thought, wrapping the two of them together. “My reasons are—selfish.” She shrugs.

Vivienne tilts her head, a silent _but?_

She worries at her bottom lip with her teeth. “They all belonged to someone—spouses, mothers, fathers. All of them were children once—not anymore, but they were.” She looks out at the churning swamp again. “And they were stolen for someone’s greedy hands, greedy magic, spun too hot, too fast, out of control. For waste. It bleeds my heart to think about it.”

The silence that falls after is curious and quiet, until Vivienne sighs.

“Rather more motherly than military,” she says, “but hardly selfish, Inquisitor.”

Somewhere between the wide grin of the moon, the raw smell of the putrid lake, and the sound of bodies charring on a journey towards peace, it becomes easy to tell her. “I’m both,” Adaar says, and watches Vivienne’s spine straighten, notch by notch, like a perfect row of embroidery stitches finding the finish.

“You have a child.” Her voice carries clearly, steadily. Never surprise. Only discovery.

“Ah,” Adaar says, “I have two.”

That makes Vivienne rise to her feet, framed by glorious moonlight. Her dark brow furrows to one single point of concern.

Adaar takes a step forward, finds a suitable boulder, and sits upon it, her long legs bent. She rests her elbows on her knees, pitching forward a little.

She doesn’t have to say, _not even Leliana knows,_ or _I’ve never told anyone_ , or _this must keep to your ears and the ears of the dead lying at our feet, and no more._ The accord between them is ironclad enough that even the reassurance of it would be insult.

“They don’t know me.” Adaar’s eyes are on the ground. “It was a long dalliance, while I was stationed in Jader. We didn’t think it was possible, but.” She flexes the hand that holds the Anchor. “This is hardly the first miracle to come out of me.”

Vivienne inhales one perfectly measured breath.

“I said my mother had died,” Adaar goes on. It tumbles out of her so easily, as though all the memories have been waiting for this precise moment of unburdening. “There’s a small community of Vashoth there. I waited the time, gave birth, and promised them into the hands of a pair of women who wanted badly wanted children.” She smiles a little. “Twins. Maram came first, dragging her brother by the feet. We named him Amal, after my father.”

When moments of uncertainty gather between them, errant dust in errant corners, Vivienne has a particular way of knitting her hands together, just once, as though to mark that these curiosities can still happen.

“What an unbearable choice.” Her tone holds no judgement. She’s crossed the distance between them now, standing at her feet.

She shakes her head. “My life is no life for children,” she says. “It was easy. They are happy. I send them coin. Their mothers write me every other year.” Her eyes rest on Vivienne’s silver boots, splashed with mud and grime. The flames burnish them in blue shadows.  

“Undead attacked their village once,” she mutters. Vivienne stills. Each word of that letter is branded ferociously into her memory. Flay open one of her arms, and it’s written on the vein with a knife’s tip.

“Doesn't help things. But they have a life.” Adaar licks her lips. “It was nothing, to give them something better. Nothing at all.”

Vivienne exhales, the rest in a bar of music. “Did you follow me out here to tell me this?” she asks, and it gives Adaar pause. Surely Vivienne knows the answer to this question. Perhaps it’s only to hear her speak the answer aloud. To give it voice. To give it life.

“Only because you went,” she says, with a listless shrug of her shoulders. It’s truth, too simple for her tastes, but ever-present. “Only that, always.”

Vivienne cups her jaw, her index finger tracing the scar that runs up behind her ear. Her hands are cool, soft. They tilt Adaar’s head up until their eyes meet. Vivienne, unreadable, haloed by a musty fog of stars. Adaar can breathe again. Like breaking the surface—

She presses her lips to her clammy forehead. Her skin alights as though this is the newest blessing of blue flames for the mire to keep. All of the night, corpse and moon alike, witnesses it.

Adaar closes her eyes, perfectly still, waiting to bend. A long, untouchable silence. 

“My dear,” whispers Vivienne, lips moving against her skin, “I must ask you a favor.”


End file.
